The suzerain Trump

[Forty Two]

Of course the rates go up.

Not just up - up ridiculously, contrary to the promises upon which it was based. Do we not remember the pre-Obamacare conversations about this? Oh, it would reduce costs, reduce fraud, streamline the administrative processes, and reduce premiums across the board, except for the very wealthy. If you like your doctor, you can keep him or her. If you like your plan, you can keep it. All bullshit. Unadulterated bullshit.

It's no answer to say "of course" this and "of course" that. The plan was sold on the exact opposite.

Obamacare is not like Medicare. They hook you into buying year after year. My state has essentially only Aetna.

That's a huge problem. Having only one payer is a problem. Your state had multiple payers competing a while back. Aetna basically left Florida. They offer 3 plans in Florida now, all of which are insanely expensive, and none of which are accepted by most physicians. I had to go shopping for a plan our pediatricians take. Because, hey, if we like our doctor, we can keep our doctor... provided we go shopping for the plan they take this year. That changes every fucking year, too. Time was, you could just re-fucking-new your plan. Now, they discontinue plans all the time, so you have reapply for a new plan, go through all the god-damn stipulations, and copay provisions, and deductible provisions, and compare and contrast this plan and that plan, do I want a PPO or an HMO, do I want high premium/low deductible (and by high premium I mean like $1,700 per month), or do I want a lower premium (like $1100 per month or so) and a higher deductible and a Health savings account (meaning you're still paying out about $1500 to $1700 per month depending on how much you dump into the HSA.

I mean, Tero, please. I know you love Obama, and you want to be all left wing "kinder than thou" and you care about the poor and the health of the people and all that, while other folks are heartless scumbags who only want to see people dying in the streets, but, there is no shining up this turd. Even good-faith, totally nice folks like Obama, Clinton, Reid, Pelosi, etc., even they can get it wrong once in a while. Loyalty doesn't mean you just keep finding ways to put lipstick on a pig.

The healthcare monopoly isn't cheap. The hospitals and doctors will charge whatever the insurance is willing to pay.

You have a different definition of "monopoly" than in common parlance, but before Obamacare there wasn't a monopoly. If there is now, that's a change from 8 years ago. But, if this "hospitals and doctors will charge whatever insurance is willing to pay" was obvious in 2010, why did you support Obamacare? Or, are you going the "oh, of course..." route now because you can see it's a shitstorm but you have to come up with a way to make it palatable. "Oh, pshaw, you sill goose! We all know the insurance would be much more expensive, and you wouldn't likely be able to keep your doctor or plan, and it wouldn't reduce costs or premiums... everybody knew that! Whyever would you think otherwsise...?"

The catastrophic plans had little to do with where the rates were going. Those people never used insurance so their input to the calculations was minimal.

Which calculations? Indeed, the catastrophic plans were a good buy for people who could weather a $5,000 or $10,000 storm, but just needed to make sure they could be covered for larger issues. Fuck 'em, though! Those are the ones who should have been paying more, to make the entire system more affordable across the board, right? We have to have everyone in the plan to make sure there is a broader set of premium payers, and the $50k and $75k a year single men who weren't interested in paying $1200 month for health insurance, well, they were getting off light! They needed to be paying "their fair share" so that the rest could get coverage. Worked out great! now everyone is paying out the ass!

As soon as "insurance pays for it" enters into healthcare, doctors will always charge the maximum. Obamacare or not. Trend was always a bigger % of your income.

Obamacare caused that to skyrocket much faster than ever before. it's not even debatable.

Of course insurance causes costs to go up. Once an individual is covered by insurance, his or her incentive is to use the insurance. So, instead of living with a dent in your car, you go get it fixed. When you have health insurance and your kid gets the sniffles, there is no downside to take him or her into the doctor. And, the doctor has a bigger incentive to err on the side of providing the service.

With a single payer plan, there is a similar cost incentive. the government remedies that with price controls, and creating long lines for disfavored procedures, and simply excluding certain procedures to save costs. There is no panacea.

[Tero]

Actuarial calculations. The ones you never see.

Obamacare was always a step toward single payer. It is still the system Germany uses. Rates have not gone up as doctors and clinics there manage costs.

[Forty Two]

Actuarial calculations. The ones you never see.

Oh, o.k. then. The ACA is great. I see it now. Premiums are lower, costs are down, fraud has been greatly eliminated, the administrative costs have been streamlined, the poor have health insurance, and there are hardly any more uninsured. I'm going to call Florida Blue and let them know about the actuarial tables we never see, and they'll tell me the real premium. My $1200 per month probably has an extra zero on it by mistake.

[Tero]

The reason insurance plans drop states and Obamacare is they don't need patients. Neither doctors or insurance needs us. They can squeeze all their income out of corporations. This Obamacare vs corporate client separation means we never get the best deal.

[Tero]

It's working. We just did not give it enough time

Paul Ryan's favorite Obamacare talking point, debunked

Republicans have long warned that Obamacare would inevitably end in a death spiral in the markets for individual insurance policies, while Democrats considered such concerns overblown. After insurers’ costs rose dramatically last year, they raised premiums accordingly—around 20 percent on average for benchmark plans—and some dropped out of the market altogether. In turn, Republicans began claiming that their warnings were proving correct. The death spiral was beginning, they said.

Yet the recent enrollment figures don’t back up those claims. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services released its first full enrollment report for 2017. As of December 24, about 11.5 million individuals had signed up for an ACA plan either on the Obamacare exchange or on the 11 state exchanges, a slight increase over the same period last year.

It’s impossible to know for sure whether that’s driving the enrollment numbers, and given the GOP’s intent to repeal the law, we may never find out. Regardless, the fact is that those people are still purchasing insurance and keeping the insurance markets afloat.

Despite those real challenges, the law’s critics, including Ryan, are getting ahead of themselves in saying the law has entered a death spiral. In some ways, in fact, the law is moving in the opposite direction: S&P, for instance, projected smaller losses for insurers in 2017 than in 2016, potentially portending smaller premium hikes.

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/20 ... ked-000281

[Forty Two]

The reason insurance plans drop states and Obamacare is they don't need patients. Neither doctors or insurance needs us. They can squeeze all their income out of corporations. This Obamacare vs corporate client separation means we never get the best deal.

LOL - do you believe you make sense?

The reason insurance plans drop states and Obamacare is that they lose money. Insurance companies don't have patients. They have customers who buy policies. It's all on paper. They don't get to a point of having enough insureds that it's too much trouble to maintain them. They can keep adding as many insureds as they want. What do you think? They run out of file room and server/mainframe capacity?

What do you mean by "Obamacare vs corporate client separation." Obamacare is not an insurance plan - or a program. It's a mandate to purchase health insurance, and the provision of subsidies to low income people on a sliding scale. Lower-middle income people get a small subsidy, which then increases as incomes get lower. The average person pays way the fuck more than they used to, except that the huge bulk of people who get their insurance coverage through group plans based on their employment don't get bit as much. The architects of this boondoggle were smart enough to make sure that people who get employment through their employer would not see a connection between Obamacare and their coverage. That's why large swaths of people who are employed just think Obamacare was a program that made sure that poor people got coverage they couldn't get before. It was a magnificent shell game perpetrated on the american people.

people want so badly to believe that we've just got a kindly program that made sure the uninsured "got access" to "affordable" health insurance, that they ignore the facts right in front of their face that the whole thing is a monstrous waste of money.

Whatever happened to all the griping about how we pay more for health insurance in the US than any other western country. That gap has significantly widened under Obamacare. Not a problem anymore, right? One of the reasons they sold this ACA to the people was to make sure that we pay less for health care per capita and less for health insurance. Neither of those "problems" was solved by the ACA. Bother were exacerbated. Nobody cares anymore, because the New York Times and CNN won't do an expose' on now much more we pay for health care than in europe anymore. Nobody does exposes on how Cuba kicks our ass anymore on health care, right? Somehow, Obammmycare has made that all better! Now, we get the best care in the world and we've extended that to the "poorest and most vulnerable among us!" Aren't we grand!?

[Forty Two]

It's working. We just did not give it enough time

Paul Ryan's favorite Obamacare talking point, debunked

Republicans have long warned that Obamacare would inevitably end in a death spiral in the markets for individual insurance policies, while Democrats considered such concerns overblown. After insurers’ costs rose dramatically last year, they raised premiums accordingly—around 20 percent on average for benchmark plans—and some dropped out of the market altogether. In turn, Republicans began claiming that their warnings were proving correct. The death spiral was beginning, they said.

Yet the recent enrollment figures don’t back up those claims. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services released its first full enrollment report for 2017. As of December 24, about 11.5 million individuals had signed up for an ACA plan either on the Obamacare exchange or on the 11 state exchanges, a slight increase over the same period last year.

It’s impossible to know for sure whether that’s driving the enrollment numbers, and given the GOP’s intent to repeal the law, we may never find out. Regardless, the fact is that those people are still purchasing insurance and keeping the insurance markets afloat.

Despite those real challenges, the law’s critics, including Ryan, are getting ahead of themselves in saying the law has entered a death spiral. In some ways, in fact, the law is moving in the opposite direction: S&P, for instance, projected smaller losses for insurers in 2017 than in 2016, potentially portending smaller premium hikes.

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/20 ... ked-000281

It's just a bunch of garbage - all the cheerleaders for the ACA lie like rugs.

Among those newly gaining coverage, 9.6 million people enrolled in employer-sponsored health plans, followed by Medicaid (6.5 million), the individual marketplaces (4.1 million), non marketplace individual plans (1.2 million) and other insurance sources (1.5 million). http://www.rand.org/news/press/2015/05/06.html

In other words, what happens when the economy improves and people get new jobs, they enroll in employer sponsored health plans. Poor people enrolled in expanded medicare.

The Obamacare marketplaces account for about 1/4 of the enrollees getting new insurance and they aren't necessarily unininsured. Remember, people enrollling in the marketplace mostly already had insurance. They just started enrolling on the marketplace websites when the law came into effect to see if they were eligible for a subsidy.

The press just publishes what the Obama administration spits out. It's all rosy, until you examine the numbers. http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapotheca ... 35373d3eeb

[Tero]

LOL - do you believe you make sense?

The reason insurance plans drop states and Obamacare is that they lose money. Insurance companies don't have patients.

The corporations with 5000 or more patients, I mean employees, are self insuring. They are no risk at all to insurance companies. They get fees for handling paperwork. They absolutely do not need us. Get that!

[Forty Two]

LOL - do you believe you make sense?

The reason insurance plans drop states and Obamacare is that they lose money. Insurance companies don't have patients.

The corporations with 5000 or more patients, I mean employees, are self insuring. They are no risk at all to insurance companies. They get fees for handling paperwork. They absolutely do not need us. Get that!

They are absolutely not self-insurance. They have group plans through major insurance companies.

It's not a question of "need." Insurance companies leave the marketplace when they can't make money. They don't give a fuck about who they need or don't need. They care about making money. If the total premiums and other income in a region can't pay for the claims such that they make a profit in accordance with their business plan, they will shut down and stick in regions that they are successfully operating in. Aetna left Florida because they weren't getting enough insureds to buy their policies -- and their operating costs were too much for the premiums they were collecting. That's it.

You seem to think you make sense here. O.k. so you have some corporations with 5,000 or more employees. What do you mean they are "no risk at all to insurance companies?" They get fees for handling paperwork? Do you mean that the insurance companies don't want to sell policies outside of these large corporations because it's too much trouble or something? That's absurd.

[Scot Dutchy]

There is a thread for this crap 42. Please take it there.

This the Trumpcunt thread.

[Forty Two]

There is a thread for this crap 42. Please take it there.

This the Trumpcunt thread.

Fuck off. It wasn't I that brought it up. Direct your ire to the person who raised the issue.

[Forty Two]

Now we're talkin'.... http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/boom- ... le/2612037

Let's start trimming the fat!

It would be amazing to see an actual cut in spending.

[Jason]

Putin: Obama's govt is working hard to undermine Trump

MOSCOW — In a biting attack, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday accused the outgoing U.S. administration of trying to undermine President-elect Donald Trump by spreading fake allegations and said those who are doing it are "worse than prostitutes."

The statement reflected the Kremlin's boiling anger at President Barack Obama's administration, which declined to comment on Putin's accusation.

Asked about an unsubstantiated dossier outlining unverified claims that Trump engaged in sexual activities with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel, Putin dismissed it as "fake" and "nonsense" and said it was part of efforts by Obama's administration to "undermine the legitimacy of the president-elect" despite his "convincing" victory.

Trump earlier rejected the sexual allegations as "fake news" and "phoney stuff."

Putin's broadside at the White House reveals a culmination of tensions between Moscow and Washington, which have built up over the Ukrainian crisis, the Syrian war and the allegations of Russian meddling in the U.S. election.

"People who order such fakes against the U.S. president-elect, fabricate them and use them in political struggle are worse than prostitutes," Putin said. "They have no moral restrictions whatsoever, and it highlights a significant degree of degradation of political elites in the West, including in the United States."

He spoke in Moscow during a news conference following talks with the president of Moldova.

The Russian leader ridiculed the authors of the Trump dossier for alleging that Russian spy agencies were collecting compromising material on Trump when he visited Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant.

"He wasn't a politician, we didn't even know about his political ambitions," Putin said. "Do they think that our special services are hunting for every U.S. billionaire?"

Putin also sarcastically suggested that Trump, who met the world's most beautiful women at the pageant, had a better choice for female companionship than Moscow prostitutes, even though Putin claimed "they are also the best in the world."

He said Trump's foes are ready to go as far as to "stage a Maidan in Washington to prevent Trump from entering office," in reference to the alleged U.S. role in organizing protests in the main square of the Ukrainian capital, the Maidan, which forced the nation's Russia-friendly president from power in 2014.

"People who are doing that are inflicting a colossal damage to the interests of the United States," Putin said.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/world/1432 ... mine-trump

He's right you know.

[Scot Dutchy]

Of course dahling.

[L'Emmerdeur]

"How Repealing Portions of the Affordable Care Act Would Affect Health Insurance Coverage and Premiums"

From the Congressional Budget Office:

The number of people who are uninsured would increase by 18 million in the first new plan year following enactment of the bill. Later, after the elimination of the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility and of subsidies for insurance purchased through the ACA marketplaces, that number would increase to 27 million, and then to 32 million in 2026.

Premiums in the nongroup market (for individual policies purchased through the marketplaces or directly from insurers) would increase by 20 percent to 25 percent—relative to projections under current law—in the first new plan year following enactment. The increase would reach about 50 percent in the year following the elimination of the Medicaid expansion and the marketplace subsidies, and premiums would about double by 2026.